


gone

by Drbwho



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M, indoctrinated garrus prompt
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-31
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-13 15:10:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9129802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drbwho/pseuds/Drbwho
Summary: When she finds him it’s far too late.





	1. Chapter 1

When she finds him it’s far too late. Months of searching, of a labyrinth of hopeless turns and dead ends, and he's finally, painfully in front of her. There are piles of husks to the left and right, the trophies that marked her journey to meet him, and perhaps she should be on alert for more, perhaps her eyes should be darting to either side to be entirely sure that's the last of them for now, but she can't. She can't move; she can't look away from what's become of him. 

“Garrus.” A word filled to the brim with the unspoken, and she wonders if enough of him is left to understand:  _I love you. I’m sorry. I’ll fix this._

The last is a lie, and even to herself she is unable to believe. If there had been a way to repair it she would have found it, _someone_ would have found the means to overcome indoctrination. Civilisations ago, a million years of this and it’s never been done before. Greater worlds had fallen to it. She was foolish to believe anything different; she was an idiot to let the universe think she could be their saviour when she couldn’t even save him.

The turian moves just as fast as she remembers. He points his gun, and she knows he will not miss. He’s never failed, not when it counted, not when it meant the difference between meeting back at the Normandy or discovering just which species' religion was right. And she’s almost prepared to let him have it then; her limbs relax while her mind screams, the dichotomy threatening to do the grisly job for him. Her eyes close, she breathes, she calms, she prepares. She waits for the nothingness, she waits until she can find him again, after, _after_.

Ten seconds, she counts, and the only noise she hears is her own ragged inhalation. He is silent; years of learned noiselessness, the quiet dance of a sniper. And then, a deafening thud- a weapon dropping. She wills herself to see him once more, to truly look at him before the end arrives.

His hand is open, empty, the weapon rests on the solid earth below him. His fingers twitch, his arm is rigid. He is fighting. 

Perhaps she knows him better than most, better than anyone, but it would not take much to find the conflict in his tensed posture, his unsteady gait, his sad eyes. She remembers Saren, she remembers Benezia, and she can see so well that selfsame bewilderment in him. It is a fleeting thing, that lucid desperation, replaced so swiftly by the glossy certitude of the Reapers’ suggestion, and back again until he is himself and then, he is both and neither.

His arms had been injured, she sees, and in place of armour or muscle is the latticework of metal that comes with their cruel modification. He is not a husk, not yet; they knew she’d have less of a struggle killing the shell of her lover. They must certainly know even now she is considering how much of him is left and how much is gone.

She cannot stop the flood of memories, then. Their first meeting on the Citadel, his youthful need for justice and the tenacity that followed when the truth of the matter grew dire. And when she met him years later, both of them dead and alive, the way his eyes had hardened with loss and struggle, and the way they softened for her. She remembers the simple relief of his presence, of something familiar among the rubble of her past and the uncertainty of her future. He’d been there, with her, when all others turned away.

Oh, and those first awkward conversations, the logistics of it all once she’d told him how she felt. His forehead pressed to hers, six fingers twined with ten, a dance amidst destruction. One good thing as life crumbled around them. What a shame there hadn’t been enough time, enough words, enough anything. What a shame the world was nearing an end.

There was no Shepard without Vakarian now. She would never smile again for him, or feel him laugh against her neck. And that is how their enemies have succeeded in the past. This, she knows, this is how they win wars. This is how they have found triumph against countless stronger species for such an incomprehensible span of time. They do not simply kill, although they have no difficulty on that front, they calculate, they aim to hurt.

_This hurts you. I know you feel this._

They must kill what they love to survive. It is not a war anyone has known before. It is a personal battle as much as a universal one; how many will die before it isn’t worth the fight? For her, she wonders now if that number is lower than she ever thought imaginable.

He speaks, then. He says her name and it is a comfort and a dagger; it is something real, and something that gives her a woeful fortitude. Shepard can see his own cogency failing, and his weapon is close enough to reach in a second’s time. He is giving her an opportunity, he is begging her to fire. 

She can’t. She turns, she runs.

One day, one day she will have the strength to become a monster.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Opps I added more.

_Go out there and give them hell._

She hears him in her head.

_You were born to do this._

It is an almost constant, at the end, and she wonders if her mind is truly beyond her control. She wonders if she has finally lost the grip on her sanity. She wonders if that’s how he feels, now. Trapped in his skull as suggestion creeps in, as the toll of their battle becomes naught but numbers, as the people in this war melt into nothing but vestiges of programmed calculus. No reason, no ransom, no way to connect or appeal. It chills her to the bone to think of it. It wakes her up from fitful sleep.

Either way, they are at the end, and as it has been from the start their chance of victory slips into a near impossibility. Most that could have gone wrong has done so as ships blink out above them, as red beams demolish those below. Still, she has Anderson, and she has her crew, and so she is not without hope. They have made it so very far, gained more ground than civilisations long gone, and at the very least they should all be immeasurably proud.

For the life of her, she can’t remember if she told them how lucky she was to have them. Her chest tightens, jawline firms, her left fist clenches and relaxes. She can’t remember if she ever told him how lucky she felt to have him.

She steps to the open area where a wall would have prevailed before the war, staring out into the grey. The air is heavy with the promise of loss; every goodbye is a final one, every gunshot or blast could be the end of someone she cares for. No one says it, no one mentions him, and she ought to consider it a kindness. Instead it twists the knife a little further into her, reminds her of all the things she did not do, and all the people she could not save.

If she closes her eyes she can forget the smell of London burning, and the taste of ash on her lips falls away for the briefest moment. She can feel his forehead rest on her own, and the grip on her waist is grounding, stabling her amid the destruction. Shepard can hear him, louder and more clear than the screams and wails of the dying, his confidence in her unfailing from the first.

_That’s my girl._

And that is what gives her the strength to go on.

 

 -

 

The Citadel is above, the earth below her cracked and blistering, and she runs for the last time. She can pretend he's behind her in this way, watching her back, ready to take out any stray enemies. It is an illusion she lets herself cling to, if only to keep herself propelling forward, if only to keep her moving.

But then, she hears him.

He’s calling her name, yelling it, and for a half second she thinks it’s really him there with her. It is a startling enough sound that she actually _turns_ , her mind betraying her in a reflex she did not know she’d learned. And he _is_ there, of course he’s there. Where else would he be but with her for the final show? He slows to a stop when she looks at him. He does not draw his weapon.

He is not so different than the last time she saw him. Perhaps his armour has a few more dents, but she doubts the Reapers care just how quickly he dies. Or perhaps he is there by their machination, perhaps they mean to kill her in the cruelest possible way, and isn’t that an excruciating thought? All the while her body tells her to move, to find safety, or at least finish her mission, but her legs will not budge. She stares, she wishes she could fix him, she wishes she could tell him.

The husk comes out of nowhere, or she is too stunned to notice it until it grabs her by the shoulders. Muscle memory takes over, and she is fighting back in an instant, tensing to sink a blow into a fleshy area alongside metal. She retracts, preparing to strike, but half of the thing’s head is gone before she can follow through. It drops, twitches, and stills, dying the way it might have it were still a human. Maybe a part of it still is.

His gun is still raised when she looks back to him, and her eyes narrow in question. He's still in there, he's still fighting. 

And for a half second he is himself again, when he speaks a single word. “Shepard.” A warning, and had that been a bullet meant for her with a last minute change of trajectory? How much strength to fight was left in him?

She nods, grateful. She takes a breath and then: “I’m going to fix this.”

The last time, she ran away so she wouldn’t do something terrible. This time, she runs to save him. Her feet carry her away, away from his voice and toward the line of light. A car flips to the left of her, and she ducks at the last moment and rolls away. Her knee nearly gives out as she stands into a sprint once more, but there is no room for failure, not when she notices the numbers of those around her have dwindled to a handful.

A few more feet, a few more final steps and she’ll be there, and that’s when she’s hit.

**Author's Note:**

> a quiet and depressing foray into mass effect. 
> 
> (sorry about this)  
> (also i'm slightly tempted to keep this going - oops)


End file.
